All skin and no shame

...innocence is just an illusion...

Title: November RainPairing: YunJae, side!YooSuMinRating: PG-13Length: ChapteredGenre: AU, angstDisclaimer: I don't own anything apart from the story. I wish I had YunJae and if I had my way, they'd move to New Zealand so they can be civil-unionised here :PSummary: I know that you can love me, when there’s no one left to blame. So never mind the darkness, we still can find a way - He can see the pain, the way it ripples just underneath the surface, and far from running away, all he wants to do is claim him. Nothing lasts forever…not even ink. Time heals all wounds they say, but sometimes it takes a wound to heal a wound.AN1: This wouldn't leave me alone. It's sort of how The Tattooist was originally meant to be…it was not meant to be cracky and so damn fluffy you’d get a fucking toothache. April told me to try and complete the idea within a oneshot. Well, I failed lmao, but I think the chapters will be short :OAN2: This edit was made by Eryn :O I miss her T_____T

He stares at the lush carpet, hearing but not listening.

Looking, but not seeing.

Existing but not living.

How many months has it been? Two? Three? He’s honestly lost track. He knows it’s far too short though. Far, far too short, but no one actually gives a fuck.

Everyone who gave a fuck is dead.

“Do you understand, sir?”

He looks up, blinking at the two men staring rather worriedly at him.

Lawyers should have poker faces, shouldn’t they?

“Summarise it for me, please.” He murmurs, voice barely above a whisper, for his throat hurts dreadfully from the last few nights.

It’s the rainy season, and where he lives, this means thunder and lightning.

And thunder and lightning means nightmares.

And nightmares mean screaming.

He doesn’t even know whether he can call them nightmares anymore.

They’re more like flashbacks.

Memories, he’s been trying to repress for what? Two months? Three?

Perhaps it isn’t really “trying” if he honestly cannot remember.

Dissociative amnesia, they called it.

All he gets are flashes, but those flashes are enough for him to wake up screaming, drenched in sweat, and crying his eyes out.

He doesn’t really know why it happens, for he can never recall specifics of his nightmares.

Just flashes.

Flashes of white.

Flashes of blue.

Flashes of red.

And the very hot flash of yellow.

He can practically feel the searing heat, and hear the screams.

And they always belong to him.

“Your fiancee had her will changed when her parents died, and she left everything to you. Your parents left everything to you too.”

“So basically I get everything?”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t want it. Not a single fucking fifty won piece. He’d rather have nothing.

“Sell everything.”

“E-e-everything, sir?” One of the kindly bespectacled gentleman stares at him in consternation.

He pauses, leaning back in his chair and staring unseeing at the two men.

His eyes move back and forth between their faces, but if someone were to ask him ten minutes later what those men looked like, he wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a line up.

He has ceased to notice anything.

“Keep the house.”

“There are several, sir. Which house do you mean?”

“The one where Jess—“ he cuts himself off.

No names.

He promised himself, no names.

He clears his throat and tries again. “The one that my fiancee and I bought. The one I’m currently living in.”

They all look the same. These two men might as well be twins for all the difference they appear to him.

“Keep the bike.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a car?”

Tactless.

Absolutely fucking tactless.

But he really doesn’t care.

He gets up, tired of the whole thing.

Tired of their attempt at sympathy.

Tired of the world thinking he has everything.

Tired of being the only one left alive when he caused the whole thing.

“No,” he replies quietly.

Respectfully.

Before he turns on his heel and walks out the ornate double doors whose only duty is to intimidate whoever is faced with them.

Nothing intimidates him though.

Nothing except thunderstorms.

*****

The music is pounding so loudly that the walls are practically vibrating. Old school rock is playing on the stereo, and he scowls as he works, cursing internally at losing that fucking bet and being stuck with the shit jobs for a month.

Shit jobs, meaning the most banal of banal ink in the whole fucking world.

He can hear his friends and brother laughing uproariously outside, even louder than the music and that is really fucking saying something.

The bastards are probably laughing at him.

Admittedly, if one of them had lost the bet, he’d definitely be laughing right about now too.

He glares at the offending rose he is colouring in, resisting the urge to accidentally use black instead of red. Why anyone would choose to put the most generic shit on their bodies is beyond him. This is not fucking high school where your friend doodles on your arm during calculus. This shit is about as permanent as you can get when it comes to body art. Though with the cost of laser treatment growing more affordable, the amount of shit jobs coming in has been steadily increasing.

The trend started a good couple of years ago.

And the result?

Increasingly uninspiring shit.

Why bother putting thought into something when it’s just as easy to get rid of it when you’re sick of it?

Disposable.

Everything is fucking disposable.

Relationships.

Careers.

Even your own fucking skin.

How goddamn sickeningly disgusting is that?

He’s really fucking tempted to ask this stupid girl if her momma ever taught her that her body is a temple and she shouldn’t be tattooing a rose on her tit.

This is the third fucking rose in a row.

All on their goddamn chests.

Airport runways more like it.

He doesn’t know why the fuck they’re bothering to call attention to their imaginary boobs.

Alright, so he’s being unkind since he personally prefers no boobs, but he is just about at the end of his patience and ready to call it quits.

There are only so many fucking roses a man can tattoo before going insane, and he’s been doing it for two weeks.

It’s gotten so bad he doesn’t even have to think about it anymore, but yet he does his best. He will always do his best regardless of the banality and the sheer stink of vanilla that almost suffocates him. Getting a tattoo nowadays is almost like a rite of passage these days, but these kids don’t seem to get that tattoos don’t translate into street cred, or whatever the fuck currency they are trading in these days.

He lives in a university town, and the canvases are aplenty.

But there is no depth.

None at all.

And he can only do so fucking much on the most insipid of flesh, no matter how talented he is.

He stops, staring at the pale white skin he is inking, knowing full well the vapid canvas will never appreciate his skill. All she wants is to get into his pants. Her creeping hand, and incessant whining would have driven him crazy had it not been for the pounding music.

Hammering a steady beat against the base of his skull.

Thudding, perpetuating a headache he’d been nursing from his over indulgence the previous night.

But it is a welcome respite and distraction.

“There, done.”

He puts the finishing touch on the beautiful rose that to him at that very second, is the ugliest fucking thing he has ever seen. His mouth is turned down into a scowl he cannot hide, and he simply grunts when the girl comments on it.

When her whining receives zero attention from him, she leaves with a pout, the cloud of vanilla ugliness trailing after her.

He cleans up, packs up, going through all the necessary motions, scowling the entire time.

“No wonder that girl ran out of here. You look like you want to murder someone,” a rather jaunty voice from the doorway observes.

“You’d be at the top of the list.”

Junsu clicks his tongue at his friend, not at all bothered by the threat as he enters the room, helping the man tidy up.

“Why are you so cranky?”

“I’ve used the same fucking stencil of the same fucking rose, on the same fucking three girls today.”

The taller man merely grunts in disgust as he readies his sketchpad for the next client. If it’s another fucking rose, he is going to fucking quit.

“Giving you the shit jobs actually took money away from the pool, you realise? Whoever takes the shit jobs takes the cash.”

“You can have it all.”

“No way.” A loud voice interrupts from the doorway yet again, as a second and third man enter the small room. It is definitely becoming a little overcrowded in there.

“Who the fuck is manning the counter?”

“I closed for lunch.”

“You’re not getting out of this.” The third man wags a finger at the extremely irritable tattooist as he slips an arm around the waist of his companion. “You’ve been a right fucking snob for years, leaving all the shit jobs to Min and Su just because you’re the best. A true artist would try and do the best he can with what he’s given.” Yoochun utters sagely as if he knows what the fuck he’s talking about. Well, he doesn’t since he’s the resident piercer, but that’s beside the point.

“You think too highly of me,” the tattooist replies. “There is only so much a man can do with the best art on the most uninspiring of canvases.”

“That girl was rather pretty.”

“Yeah,” he nods. “Pretty average.”

“You know what your problem is?” Changmin settles against Yunho’s chair, dragging Yoochun to stand between his legs, wrapping his arms around the man as he looks around him at the scowling tattooist. “You’re too fucking spoiled.”

“Spoiled by all the garbage I’ve been subjected to for two weeks, yes.” Yunho replies, deliberately misunderstanding.

“Min’s right.” Junsu nods, perching next to the tall man on the chair, rubbing his hand along the inner length of the maknae’s thigh. “All the serious guys always ask for you. Unless they specifically want the silly freshman shit, or lettering, they will always ask for you. Why do you think we decided to stop booking you more than a week in advance at a time? You’d be booked solid for months.”

“Something wrong with that?” Yunho retorts belligerently, glaring at his so-called best friend. The four of them co-own Mirotic equally, though the profits are divided according to the jobs they take, each contributing a percentage to the overhead and other incidental expenses. Shit jobs do pay well, as they are charged by the piece, and the three tattooists can easily fit in twice as many shit jobs in a day compared to the more elaborate tattoos.

Some weeks, shit jobs can easily pay all the bills.

Changmin for example, charges by the hour at times for the shit jobs, milking it for all it’s worth with his gorgeous face that girls practically trip over themselves lining up to get into his room. Many are willing to pay a full two hours for a tattoo that would’ve taken him an hour to ink, just to be in his company. The youngest of them all is an awkward kid who snarks more than he talks, but blessed with a face that the angels would probably cry over, not to mention a wiry, lanky body that seems to be all the rage at the moment, what with the increasing popularity of kpop.

He can say the meanest, shittiest things, and the girls would still flock to him, too mesmerised by his looks to actually stop and listen to what he has to say, or notice that he, Junsu, and the resident piercer are all actually a little too close to be normal.

Yoochun with his perfect smile, and the extremely disarming way he has for putting everyone and anyone at ease. Coupled with Junsu, they are both a surefire way of getting you to pierce or tattoo parts of your body you would never have imagined prior to stepping foot into Mirotic. Between the two of them, they could probably talk a nun into tattooing an upside down cross on her back, and getting a hood piercing, and on top of that, convince her to bring her fellow nuns in for similar work.

That has actually happened.

Though they were not real nuns.

Just some sophomores dressed up as nuns for Halloween.

And mixed into the unlikely threesome is the lone wolf.

Yunho.

Older brother to Yoochun, both practically sharing the same mouth, and even similar moles on their faces.

But they couldn’t be more different.

While Yoochun is the easy going, yet emotional cry baby of the lot, Yunho is the silent and brooding leader of the pack. The actual artist of the group, he has the personality of one.

He is the only one among all of them who can get through a nine hour sitting without anything more than bathroom breaks. His focus is nothing short of legendary, and his single-mindedness absolutely astounding when faced with it.

Junsu, the resident calligrapher, can go for three hours max.

Changmin, shit job extraordinaire, perhaps five.

Yoochun, zero. He has no patience, hence why he’s the piercer.

But Yunho can go on for as long as necessary.

He can channel all his needs, even the physical and emotional into his art that he has no need for companionship.

Not of the superficial kind anyway.

Unlike Junsu and his two bedmates, who slake their physical needs with each other, Yunho has been known to remain celibate for months.

It’s actually coming into fifteen months now.

Yunho isn’t asexual.

He just despises the disposable nature of society.

And yet despite all that, there is a very playful side to the oldest in the group. A side only his three co-owners have seen, and some of his regular clients.

Yunho is a paradox of the best kind.

Junsu is shaken from his wandering thoughts by Changmin biting his ear.

“I’m outta here,” Yunho mutters in disgust as he leaves his work room. “Just motherfucking clean the goddamn place up when you’re done.”

He shuts the door with a loud bang, though he knows the other three would have barely noticed his exit. He’s not sure how it happened, but Yoochun had come home one day with Changmin in tow. The two had clapped eyes on his best friend, and the three have been inseparable ever since.

And that was a good seven years ago.

It’s really no wonder that Yunho hasn’t been able to settle into any type of relationship, when the only one he’s really been subjected to is the most functional threesome he has ever seen.

A functioning dysfunction.

It’s actually a little disgusting how loving the three of them are with their random puppy piles, with Changmin usually on the bottom as the other two try and hug (or fuck) his snark away. They haven’t really succeeded as far as Yunho can tell, though sometimes he does get the feeling that the youngest snarks out of habit rather than desire.

They don’t show it in public of course, but once that closed sign is on, or they are within the walls of their apartment, all bets are off.

He has seen far more of his younger brother than he would like in multiple lifetimes.

Yunho scowls as he slips his hand into his back pocket to retrieve his pack of cigarettes and lighter. He feels like an outsider in his own fucking home.

Not that he truly minds, for his brother is happy, and that is enough for him.

He lights up the sole stick, tossing the empty box as he leaves the building, heading to the closest cafe to grab something to eat. He isn’t really hungry, but they’re probably going to be closed for a good hour so he might as well make full use of the time.

Not two steps have been taken by him off the curb when somebody in a great fucking hurry smashes right into him, making him lose his last cigarette.

He is about to growl at the man, when he catches sight of his face.

Now this is a worthy canvas.

AN1: I think you can tell I have a lot of pent up angst to get rid off.

AN2: Should I write or should I stop, and go back to fluffy SB drabbles? It’s easy for me to hide behind that universe because it’s so all-encompassing. To be honest, writing this and the fluffy drabbles both give me enough in terms of a way to release my stress and everything so yeah.

Eventhough I was hoping you'd continue either LITI or AINI, I have to admit I'm intrigued. I'm a sucker for angst and you write so well so you go with whatever that makes comfortable I know I'll love it anyway :)

you should write it.. YH's character way more more dark even compares in SB before he met JJ.. like i said, i really love character you made.. YH's here more like YH's in AINI but with more bitter experiences and sad history.. more sarcastic too.. i think you need to continue it.. hahahhaha

oh forgot to ask.. hahha did you just listening to November Rain from Gun N' Roses? bc November Rain and Roses.. LOL